From Copper Pots to Mason Jars
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins follows the spirit trade from barrel, stoneware jug and Stoddard amber bottle to Mr. Mason's patent screw-top jar, explains how the change in container changed the running trade, and tells how Barnaby the bear dealt with a jar thief. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories from the shop: filing the threads off his first Mason jar, a funnel that whistles, and a wagonload of Stoddard bottles that broke on the Pittsfield road. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, explaining lye, why coopers won't use red oak, and how shavings were used to fake aged whiskey.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Get your snout off that windowsill, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad intentions. That jar is not for you. You had your supper. You had two suppers, and one of them was a peddler's mule. Lie down before I sell you to the circus in Manchester and they put you in a little tin hat.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags, heavy body thumps down onto planks
Wilkins: That is a good bear. A bad bear, but a good bear.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners and the rare Methodist who wandered in by mistake. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host. I pull teeth, I shoe horses, I hammer copper, and I have been arrested by better men than the ones who are listening tonight. Tonight's topic is From Copper Pots to Mason Jars. We will cover how the spirit gets from the worm to your lips, what it rode in when your grandfather was a boy, and how a Philadelphia tinsmith with a thread-cutting notion changed the trade forever. Pull your chair to the stove and put your boots up. If your wife objects, tell her the doctor ordered it.
♪ Theme fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! You are hearing about copper tonight, so why not own the finest? The Flame-Flow Still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from pure electrolytic copper. See it at moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo sting
♦ Wax crackle, fire popping in an iron stove
Wilkins: Segment the first. History. Listen close, because it is cheaper than school and the teacher drinks.
Wilkins: When my grandfather made spirit in this valley, nobody poured it into anything pretty. It went into a barrel. A coopered barrel of white oak, hooped with iron or split hickory, and it went off to the tavern in Epsom or the store at Pittsfield Corners on an ox cart. The tavern keeper sold it out by the gill to farmers who had walked eleven miles in the mud to forget that they were farmers.
Wilkins: Now, a barrel has a problem, and the problem is that it is a barrel. You cannot hide forty gallons of anything under your coat, and I have tried. I once tried to hide a firkin of rum under a buffalo robe in the back of a sleigh, and the deputy asked why my blanket had hoops. I told him it was my wife and she had let herself go. He believed me, and so did she, and she has not cooked me a decent supper since.
Wilkins: So the smaller trade went into the jug. The salt-glazed stoneware jug, gray as a February sky, with a little cobalt-blue flower painted on the side by some potter in Bennington who was surely drunk when he did it. You know how they glaze those jugs? They fire the kiln as hot as the hinges of hell, then they throw common salt into the fire by the shovelful. The salt turns to vapor, the vapor settles on the clay, and it leaves a glassy skin over the whole jug that is rough as an orange peel. That is the salt glaze, and it will hold spirit until the Second Coming.
Wilkins: But a stoneware jug weighs about as much as a Baptist's conscience and is twice as hard to hide in your coat. Drop one on a granite doorstep and it goes off like a cannon at Gettysburg. And you cannot see through it. A jug keeps its secrets like a widow at a wake. You do not know what is in it until it is in you, and by then the knowing is the doctor's business.
♦ Clink of glass bottle set on a wooden plank
Wilkins: Then there was glass. Right here in our own Granite State, over in Stoddard in Cheshire County, they have been blowing bottles since the early forties. Dark amber bottles, olive bottles, the color of strong tea or a pond in October. That color does not come from any art. It comes from the iron and dirt in the Stoddard sand, the same way my complexion comes from my habits. A Stoddard bottle is a handsome thing. Hold it to the lamp and it glows like a bear's eye in a dark barn. I have seen that, and I do not recommend it.
Wilkins: But blown bottles were dear, corks were dearer, and a cork in a jolting wagon on the Suncook Turnpike is like a deacon at a dance. It holds firm at first and it is out in the road by midnight.
♦ Screw lid twisting on glass threads, a squeak of rubber
Wilkins: Now hear that. Hear that sweet squeak? That, friends, is the future. That is a Mason jar. In November of eighteen and fifty-eight, Mr. John Landis Mason, a tinsmith down in Philadelphia, took out a patent on a glass jar with screw threads molded right into its neck. A zinc lid screws down onto it and presses against a rubber ring on the shoulder, and the seal is so tight a ghost could not get in. You will find it pressed right into the glass on the side: MASON'S PATENT NOV 30TH 1858. The ladies bought them for canning their peaches and their pickles. But a peach does not pay two dollars a gallon to Mr. Lincoln's tax men, and a peach does not need to be hidden in the woodpile. It did not take long for men of my profession to look at that jar the way Barnaby looks at a lame calf.
Wilkins: Mr. Mason put threads on a jar, and in seven years he has done more for the Suncook Valley than the legislature has done since the Flood.
Wilkins: Here is why it matters. Glass does not take anything from your whiskey and gives nothing back. Old pewter mugs and flagons were often cut with lead, and lead will rot your brain, gray your gums and sour your temper, worse than marriage. Glass is honest. You can hold it to the window and see whether your spirit is clear as spring water or cloudy as a drowned man's eye. Glass tells you the truth about your whiskey, which is more than any preacher, peddler or wife has ever done for me.
♪ Fiddle bridge, a quick sawing reel
♦ Wax crackle, wind against log walls
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws and runners. And the jar changed the running trade more than the war did.
Wilkins: Think about it like a lawyer. If the sheriff stops you and finds a barrel, that is a confession. If he finds a jug, that is an excuse. But a pint jar? A pint jar is a pocketful of nothing at all, Your Honor. You can put one in a boot, a muff, a feed sack, a Bible with the middle cut out, or the hollow of a stuffed owl. I knew a woman from Loudon who carried six pints under her hoop skirt to the Grange supper and walked so stately that the minister asked if she had found religion. She told him she had found a considerable quantity of something, Reverend, and it was keeping her upright.
Wilkins: But glass has its enemies, and its worst enemy is a thief. Two winters ago, a sneak from over toward Gilmanton started stealing my filled jars off the cooling shelf behind the still-house. One a night. Then two. Then three. I wanted to know who it was, so I did what any Christian would do. I moved Barnaby's chain stake four feet closer to the shelf and greased the chain so it would not clink.
♦ Bear grunts low, chain slides
Wilkins: Third night, around two in the morning, I heard it. First the squeak of a zinc lid, because the fool was opening one to taste it right there. Then a sound like a feather bed dropped from a hayloft, and that was Barnaby landing. Then a scream, friends. That man screamed like a gelded hog at a revival, and I believe one or two in the congregation were saved by the sound of it.
Wilkins: When I got out with the lantern, Barnaby had him pinned on his back in the snow by one paw on his chest, as gentle as a mother cat, and the jar was smashed and the whiskey had run all down the man's arm into his sleeve. That bear has a powerful thirst for anything that smells of corn. He was not eating the fellow. He was licking him. He started at the fingers and worked to the elbow like it was a sugar-cured ham, and a bear's tongue is rougher than a Concord lawyer's handshake. It is like being cleaned with a rasp file. By the time I pulled him off, the fellow's forearm was pink as a new piglet and had no more hair on it than a bishop's head. He had the hide licked off three of his knuckles and the bear had swallowed his mitten whole. I found that mitten in the spring, in a condition I will not describe on the air except to say I burned it with a pitchfork.
Wilkins: I dressed his arm with clean linen, because I am a doctor of a sort, and I charged him for the jar, the linen, and the mitten. He paid me in coin, and I stamped it right there on the anvil so he would remember whose money he had lost.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. He carries that cent to this day, I am told, and he crosses the road when he passes Fort Wilkins. Barnaby misses him. Barnaby has opened more Mason jars than any housewife in Merrimack County, and he has never once used the lid.
Wilkins: Now, to talk about what goes before the jar, the copper itself, I have brought in the man who hammers it. He has forearms like two hams and a temper like a well-banked forge. He is a master coppersmith and thumper builder here at the Fort Wilkins foundry. Welcome, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister.
♦ Heavy boots on plank floor, a chair scraping
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. Mind the bear's chain on your way in. I did not, and my left boot heel is in his stomach.
Wilkins: He has eaten worse. He has eaten a revenue man's hat with the revenue man's opinions still in it. Silas, you spend your life on the pot and the worm, and tonight we are talking about the jar the spirit finally lands in. What did you think the first time you saw one of Mason's patent jars?
Silas: I will tell you the truth, and it does me no credit. I was a young man in Concord buying borax at a dry-goods counter, and there was a case of these new jars on the shelf. I picked one up and ran my thumb over the threads on the neck, and I thought, what poor work. That is a casting flaw. Some glassman let his mold slip. So I took the little file out of my apron, the one I use for burrs on a pot seam, and I started filing it smooth.
Wilkins: You did not.
Silas: I got halfway round before the clerk came over the counter at me like I was killing his mother. He said, sir, those threads are the patent. I said, then the patent is rough work. I had to pay for the jar, and I kept it, and it sits on my bench to this day with half a neck. It does not hold a lid worth anything, but it holds my pencils, and it reminds me that a man who knows metal does not know everything.
Wilkins: Silas filed the threads off a Mason jar, which is like pulling a man's teeth to make him whistle better. Speaking of whistling, tell them about the Tattler.
Silas: Ah. Well. Filling jars off the worm, a man's eyes wander. He is minding the fire, minding the thump keg, minding the window for deputies, and the jar runs over and good spirit goes on the floor. Spirit on the floor near a fire is a bad thing and I will not abide it in my shop. So I hammered a copper filling funnel with a narrow neck, and in the neck I set a little reed, the same as in a boy's willow whistle. When the jar is near full and the spirit backs up in the funnel, the air coming out gets pushed through that reed, and it gives a little peep. Peep, peep. Like a chick.
Wilkins: And why do they call it the Tattler, Silas?
Silas: Because the deputies can hear it too. I lent one to a fellow over in Chichester, and the sheriff was walking by his woodshed on a quiet night, heard it peeping, and went in looking for a lost chick. He found eleven jars instead. The fellow brought the funnel back to me and said it had testified against him. I told him the funnel was honest, and it was his woodshed that had a big mouth.
♦ Wilkins laughs, slaps the table
Wilkins: I have known judges who could not do as well. Now, your family has had a hand in glass before the jar ever came. Tell them about your great-uncle and Stoddard.
Silas: My great-uncle Abner was a coppersmith too. In the forties he traded a copper worm, a good one, twelve turns, all hand-hammered, to a glassblower in Stoddard for a full wagonload of amber bottles. Packed in straw, three hundred of them. He thought he had made the trade of his life. Then he drove them home over the hills in March, when the frost was heaving the road, and every frost-heave in Cheshire and Merrimack Counties took its share. By the time he came down into Pittsfield, the wagon sounded like a church bell falling down the stairs. He had eleven bottles left whole out of three hundred.
Wilkins: Eleven.
Silas: Eleven. The wagon bed glittered amber for years after. Folks called it the cathedral wagon. Abner said the glassblower got a worm out of it, the road got two hundred and eighty-nine bottles, and he got the lesson. The lesson was that copper bends and glass does not, so you pack glass like you are carrying eggs to a bishop.
Wilkins: And that is the very reason the jar won out. A thick-walled jar with a flat bottom stands up in a crate and does not roll around like a drunk in a ditch. Silas, one more. You have mended more copper than any man in the valley. Who brought you the strangest job?
Silas: A widow in Barnstead. She came to my shop door with a copper kettle wrapped up in a man's black Sunday coat. The kettle had a crack in the bottom from her husband leaving it dry over the fire. He had passed the winter before. She set it on my bench and unwrapped it and said, Mr. McAllister, mend the kettle and burn the coat. I asked her why burn the coat. She said, he wore that coat to every church meeting for thirty years and spent every one of them asleep, and I will not have it outlive the kettle that actually earned us a living.
Wilkins: There is a woman who knew where her bread was buttered.
Silas: I mended the kettle with a hard brazed patch, no lead, and I burned the coat in the forge. She stood and watched it go up, and she said it was the warmest that coat had ever made her feel.
Wilkins: Silas, you will stay on for the copper talk. Do not let Barnaby smell your other boot.
♪ Banjo bridge, bright and jangling
♦ Wax crackle, fire popping
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. This is the alchemy, friends, and I mean it as a science, not as a sermon. Now, the law of the land says no man shall make drinking spirit without the government's permission and the government's cut, and on this program we talk of it as history and learning only. But a man ought to know how the thing was done, and why it can kill a fool.
Wilkins: First comes the mash. The old Suncook way: you take cracked corn, about a bushel, and you cook it in hot water, stirring like a woman who has just heard gossip, until it is thick as porridge. Let it cool until you can hold your hand in it. Then stir in a few quarts of malted barley or rye. The malt has a ferment in it that turns the starch of the corn into sugar. Let it cool further to blood-warm, add your yeast, and cover it loose with a cloth. Not tight. Never tight, and never in a shut-up cellar. That mash breathes out a heavy gas as it works, and it pools low in a closed room, and it will lay a man down dead as a doornail with no smell to warn him. Keep a door open. In four days, five, six, depending on the weather, the bubbling stops and you have a sour beer, which we call the wash. It is weak stuff, a few parts in a hundred of spirit. The still is only there to gather it up.
Wilkins: Now the pot. Silas, why copper and not iron?
Silas: Iron rusts and makes the spirit taste of a horseshoe. Copper takes heat even and does not scorch in one spot. But mostly it is the stink. A wash gives off a rotten-egg stench as it boils, sulfur stuff, and the copper grabs it and holds it on its own skin, so it does not travel on into the jar. You will see it after a run as a dark tarnish inside the pot and the cap. That is the copper doing its work. Scrub it off after, keep the metal bright, and it keeps working for you. Let it go green and crusted and it quits on you, and you do not want that green in anything a man drinks.
Wilkins: And how do you join a seam?
Silas: Rivets and a hard braze or silver solder. Never soft lead solder. I have pulled lead-soldered pots out of barns from here to Alton and put every one of them on the scrap heap. Lead in a still will poison a man so slow he blames his wife's cooking.
Wilkins: Now here is where the jar comes into the craft, and it is the most important thing I will say tonight. Do not run your whole run into one big crock. Line up a row of small jars on a plank, number them with chalk, one, two, three, all down the row, and change jars as each one fills. Here is why.
Wilkins: The first spirit to come off the worm is the foreshots. It comes off first because it boils lowest, and it carries the wood alcohol, the methanol, the stuff that blinds and kills. It smells sharp, like varnish and nail-polish, I mean like a cobbler's glue pot, and it is never, ever to be drunk. Throw it out. A small jar or two, every run, no matter how proud or poor you are.
Wilkins: Next come the heads. They are still harsh and solventy and give a headache that feels like a mule kicked your skull from the inside. Those go aside as well, and they are not to be drunk.
Wilkins: Then the hearts. Sweet, clean, smooth, with a smell of the grain. That is what you came for. And you know them because you have a row of numbered jars and can go down the line and smell each one, jar by jar, and decide exactly where the heads end and the hearts begin. If it all ran into one crock, you could never pick it apart again. The poison and the good stuff would be mixed together like a church choir after the deacon's punch.
Wilkins: Last come the tails. They are oily and wet-dog smelling and weak, and they go aside to be run again another day. My first jar of hearts came out so clear the Merrimack sheriff tried to arrest the empty space behind it.
Silas: And keep the worm cold, Doctor. Tell them that.
Wilkins: I will tell them. Keep your condenser tub full of cold water and keep changing it. The spirit should come out of the worm cool to the touch. If it is coming out warm, your cooling is failing, and that means there is spirit vapor coming out with it, and spirit vapor near a fire will take your eyebrows, your barn and your life, in that order. Keep the flame low and steady. No lamp near the jars. No pipe in your mouth. I have seen a man in Northwood light his pipe over a jar of foreshots, and he went to church the next Sunday with no beard, no eyebrows, and a face like a boiled lobster, and the minister preached on hellfire and the whole congregation turned to look at him.
Wilkins: Silas, thank you for joining us at the anvil.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. Keep your seams brazed, folks.
♦ Chair scrapes, boots on planks, distant bear grunt
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: And now a word from the men who keep the lamps lit at Fort Wilkins.
♪ Brisk medicine-show banjo vamp
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, step right up! Are you tired of dented pots, sour runs and metal that would shame a tinker's mule? Then lend me your ears, friends, for this is the genuine article! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of the fleet, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the cleanest copper a smith can hammer, joined with precision CNC-machined brass unions that fit as tight as a deacon's purse strings! The Flame-Flow still is designed to maximize convective circulation, moving the heat so even and so true that it delivers unmatched purity for your essential oils, your herbal tinctures and your traditional distillation demonstrations! Handcrafted, pure copper, built to last your lifetime and your grandson's too, for only eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! Do not wait, do not dither! Visit moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still today. That is moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! Or come see it shine with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Mind the bear!
♪ Banjo flourish and button
♦ Wax crackle, stove door creaks open and shut
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mail. We have a recorded voice come all the way down the line from the Carolina mountains. Let us hear it.
♦ Phonograph needle drop, hiss, faint warble
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, your uncle is a man of faith, and I respect faith, the same way I respect a mule. From a distance. Let us take his medicine apart one ingredient at a time.
Wilkins: First, the hickory ashes. What happens when you pour water through wood ashes? Every farm wife in Merrimack County knows. You get lye. Potash. Up and down this valley there were asheries, where men leached ashes in big hoppers and boiled the lye down to potash for soap and glass and shipped it to Boston by the ton. Lye is strong alkali. It will eat the skin off your hands and the bristles off a hog. So when your uncle throws ashes in his thumper, he is putting lye in his whiskey, and do you know what you get when you mix lye with grease and heat?
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Soap! Your uncle put lye in the thump keg. That is how you make soap, and he will have the cleanest bowels in Wilkes County. Now, the lye might soften a sharp, sour edge, the way baking soda calms a sour stomach. That is all it does. It does nothing to the wood alcohol, and the bad heads come off the worm at the start of the run whether the keg is full of ashes, apples, or old hymnals. The only cure for bad heads is throwing them out.
Wilkins: Now, the red oak shavings, and here there is a true story behind the lie. Ask any cooper why he will not make a whiskey barrel out of red oak. Old Tobias Pease, a cooper in Pittsfield when I was a boy, used to take a red oak stave, put one end in his mouth and blow, and you could see bubbles come out the other end in a pail of water. Red oak is full of open pores, like a sponge with a grudge. White oak has its pores plugged up by nature, and that is why every honest barrel is white oak. A red oak barrel is like a county treasurer: everything you put in it leaks out the sides and none of it comes back.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So why did old-timers put oak shavings in their whiskey? I will tell you, Rabbit, because I have caught men at it. Throw a handful of oak shavings into raw white whiskey and in a day or two it turns brown as a saddle. Then you can sell it to a city man as ten-year-old Old Monongahela at triple the price. It is not cleaning anything. It is costume. It is putting a beaver hat on a hog and calling it the governor. The only thing red oak shavings ever aged was the customer, and only because he lived longer than he deserved after drinking it.
Wilkins: Now there is one grain of truth, and I will give your uncle his due. Charcoal, real burnt charcoal packed in a filter, will take out some of the rough taste of a finished spirit after it is made. That is not ashes, and it is not shavings, and it is never in the thump keg. And no charcoal on God's earth takes out the wood alcohol. You must cut it out at the worm, into those little numbered jars, and pour it on the ground.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: While we are smashing idols, here is one more for the jars. Folks say if you shake a jar and the bubbles, the bead, sit up high and hold, then the whiskey is strong and good. The bead tells you something about strength, rough as a guess. It tells you nothing at all about whether the poison was cut out. A jar of foreshots will bead up as pretty as a bride. Do not trust a bead and do not trust a bride's mother, and you will live long in this valley.
Wilkins: Rabbit, you have done us proud, and you have given your uncle a lifetime supply of being wrong. This counterstamped cent goes in the mail to you in Wilkesboro, struck tonight on this very anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Tell your uncle to keep the ashes for the soap kettle and the shavings for kindling.
♪ Banjo bridge
Announcer: A quick word before we part, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, handcrafted to last. Order yours at moonshinestill.com, moonshinestill.com, or visit Fort Wilkins on Route 28!
♪ Theme rises softly, parlor banjo and mountain fiddle
♦ Wax crackle, slow drip into glass jar
Wilkins: That is our broadcast, friends. If tonight's talk of pots and jars has made you hungry to learn the craft right, the history and the metal and the honest cuts, then sit at my bench in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach copper, mash, fire, and cuts the old way and the safe way. And I teach under the law of the land. That means proper permits for anything you mean to drink, and history and demonstration for everything else. Barnaby sits in on the lessons. He has never passed one, but he has eaten three diplomas.
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, who is somewhere outside right now trying to get his other boot back from the bear. My thanks to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, and to his uncle, who will be wrong in a new way by next week. And my thanks to Mr. John Landis Mason of Philadelphia. He never sent me a cent, but I would stamp one for him gladly.
Wilkins: Remember, friends. Everything you heard tonight is history and education only, and making drinking spirit without the government's permit is against the law. I have been arrested twice, and I do not recommend it. The food is poor and the company is worse.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades out into wax cylinder crackle